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Make Time
What It’s About
Make Time shows you how to intentionally make time for the things that truly matter.
Three Key Ideas
Change Your Defaults, Not Yourself
Distraction wins not through laziness but through design defaults that must be actively replaced, not fought with willpower.
One Daily Highlight
Choosing a single 60-to-90-minute priority each day creates more satisfaction and focus than managing a long task list.
Body Powers the Brain
Exercise, real food, timed caffeine, and sleep are not optional extras but the energy source that makes sustained focus possible.
Read a Sample
The Two Thieves
Here's a question worth sitting with for a minute. When did you last finish a workday able to point to one thing you actually did? One thing that mattered to you, not to your inbox, your Slack channel, or a manager three time zones away? If you can't remember, you're in good company. Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky wrote Make Time because they couldn't remember either, and they had reason to be embarrassed about it. Jake had worked on the Gmail team at Google. John had helped redesign YouTube around minutes watched. They built the machines that were eating everyone's afternoons, and then they noticed, a little sheepishly, that the machines were eating theirs too.
Their argument starts with two villains. The first is the Busy Bandwagon, the unspoken cultural rule that a calendar should be full, an inbox should be empty, and any minute that isn't visibly productive needs an explanation. The second is the Infinity Pool, the authors' name for any source of content that refills itself the moment you reach the bottom. Think Twitter, the news cycle, Netflix's autoplay, the email thread that never closes. Think pull-to-refresh and the never-ending feed. The two thieves work as a team. The Busy Bandwagon keeps you reactive all day, and the Infinity Pools sweep up whatever scraps of attention are left in the evening. The authors note, almost cheerfully, that the average person now spends more than four hours a day on a smartphone and another four watching television. Distraction's become a full-time job.
The hard part isn't laziness. It's that both thieves run as defaults, the preset option that stays in place unless somebody actively changes it. Notifications are on by default. Email sits open in another tab by default. The TV is the centerpiece of the living room by default. Your calendar is open for anyone to fill by default. Willpower has to fight each of these defaults, one at a time, all day long. Willpower's going to lose. The book's central insight is that you don't fight defaults. You change them.
Who It’s For
- Anyone who ends most workdays unable to name one thing they truly accomplished.
- Anyone who wants to spend more time on personal projects but keeps losing evenings to apps and TV.
- Anyone who feels busy all the time yet still behind on what actually matters to them.
- Anyone who has tried productivity systems and found they only made them faster at other people's priorities.
About the Author: Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky
Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky are former Google and Google Ventures designers. Knapp created the five-day design sprint process used at Google Ventures with companies like Slack and Uber, and later wrote the book Sprint. Zeratsky worked on products including YouTube, where he helped redesign the platform around watch time.
Both authors write from direct experience building the very apps they argue are stealing your attention. That tension gives Make Time much of its credibility.
